January 31, 2004:

A few odd lots while the snow comes down, to
the tune of perhaps 4" by tomorrow:

Jeannie the Cleaning Lady blew through our new house like a hurricane
over the last few days, getting rid of construction grime and misplaced
paint splotches, and now it's basically habitable. We're still doing
the blue-tape-and-punch-list thing, but the end may well be in sight.
She peeled all the blue plastic off our kitchen counters and appliances
this afternoon, and we finally saw our kitchen as it was destined to
be. I was awestruck. I'll post a photo once I can snap one in better
light.

Jason Kaczor sent me a cool link about a
long-running experiment devised in 1927 to measure the ability of
pitch to flow like a liquid. Here's another
article about several long-running experiments, including the pitch
drop. Basically, a funnel full of pitch under a bell jar at room temperature
releases a drop about every eight or nine years. Glass won't do that.
Now, nobody's ever actually seen the pitch drop fallbut
you can try your luck by connecting to a Webcam focused on the apparatus.
A drop is apparently about ready to go, so tune in and see if you can
spot it. (Finally, something worse than watching water boil!)

I've run across an
interesting LCD display from Samsung, the 213t, which, like the
now-extinct Radius Pivot, can spin from portrait to landscape mode with
aplomb. I'll need a new large-format monitor when we move, and this
one looks real good. It'll be my first experience with DVI, which is
something I need to know more about than I do.

Carol and I met 34 1/2 years ago today. A love like ours can't be
celebrated too often!

January 29, 2004:

As Brook Monroe most helpfully pointed out,
I had forgotten that glass was a supercooled fluid (see yesterday's entry)
because...it isn't. Glass being a supercooled fluid is a sort of
geek
urban legend. Glass is actually a simple amorphous solid, and nobody's
really sure why it fractures the way it does. Another nice piece on the
subject that Brook sent me is here.

My experience with optical glass-pushing involved something that really
is a supercooled fluid: Pitch. When you sandwich a layer of pitch between
two glass disks, the pitch flows under the weight of the upper disk until
it contacts the upper disk (which has the optical surface) smoothly and
completely. Rubbing the glass over the pitch allows you to polish an accurate
spherical or parabolic surface, though it takes more time than modern
folk like to spend on such things. (In looking back, my 10" F6.7
praabolic mirror took me about 600 hours to complete. However, at age
15, with neither job nor girlfriend, it was an expenditure I was more
than willing to make.)

In working with pitch at Adler Planetarium's optical shop in Chicago, I
did notice that hard pitch, if struck on an edge, tended to produce a conchoidal
fracture that looked a lot like glass chipped on an edge, but that may be
the best evidence I ever had for glass's fluidity. Alas, my big sin was
not researching it on the Web a little more before writing an entry on it.
Mea Culpa.

January 28, 2004:

How's
Jeff's House Coming?

We're in the thick of the "punch list" game, in which we
walk around the house and slap pieces of blue tape on dings and scrapes
and badly done stuff, and the contractor calls in his subs to fix them.
This is a lot of work and hair-tearing, hence my recent silence here.
It should be ours in two more weeks, with any luck. The miracle is,
that's barely ten days behind the schedule we set back in June!

On the other hand, the house is basically done. A professional cleaning
service is working through it this week, blowing dust out of cracks
and taking all the stickers off the windows and generally getting the
place habitable. At left is a photo of the rear half of my lower level
workshop, with my 16' bench and plugmold strip, served by a separate
20 amp line with its own breaker. Yum! The workshop is 11' wide and
47' long. If I ever give up electronics it will make a fine bowling
alley.

Roy Harvey wrote to say that while he lived in England he lived in
a house with a name, and his address was: Cobwebs, North Lane, West
Hoathly, East Grinstead, West Sussex. A house named "Cobwebs"
sounds very gothor hey, Roy, was it simply truth in advertising?
(Given that "Sussex" is short for "South Saxon"
the name embraces all four points of the compass...even better than
living on East Northwest Highway!)

Although we haven't seen them yet, neighbors tell us that our new
neighborhood is sometimes overrun with wild turkeys. The place is already
overrun with white-tailed deer, and we have seen abundant evidence of
local bears that folks say are fat, well-fed, and easy to outrun. I
almost ran over a red fox the other night. Should be an interesting
place to live.

Many thanks to all the people who wrote to explain why some glass
shatters into daggers and others into blunt little cubes. It all has
to do with tempering, which is a way of managing stresses within the
glass. I knew (but had forgotten) that glass is actually a supercooled
fluid, whereas diamond is inescapable crystalline. Juan Castro De La
Cruz wrote to suggest that because diamond has a rhombic crystalline
structure, a pane of diamond "glass" would shatter into small
rhomboidal fragments. I had begun to wonder if it were possible to create
amorphous diamond, but then realized that amorphous diamond is that
black stuff inside pencils.

As I'm sure you can tell by now, I'm too pooped to be profound. Give
me a couple of days to relax a little, and I may have some more interesting
things to say. In the meantime, I'm going to hit the sack and dream
of having no more punch list items to deal with!

January 24, 2004:

There
was something extremely satisfying about getting our house numbers put
up on Friday. My sense of place, which has always been extremely important
to me, was much stronger after that, standing in front of the house I'll
be living in shortly.

We don't name houses here in the US like they do in England (where an
address can be something like "Crustwyck House, Quibble-on-Wust,
Wumbledorf, Middlesex") so the numbers take on the same mythic importance
of names.

I'm also quite thankful of the smallness of Colorado Springs, where I can
actually have an address with only three digits in it. Public safety law
here requires that house digits be at least 6" high, and mounted under
a light. Our neighbors in Scottsdale had an address like 33046 N. 69th Streetwhich
would have been completely hopeless on our garage pillar!

January 23, 2004:

One of the hassles a Windows application developer
has to deal with is laying hands on suitable icons. One issue, on which
Brook Monroe has written, is the difficulty of expressing a subtle idea
like "find next" or "filter on filename" in a 32 X
32 block of pixels. My take on that is not to sweat what the icon itself
looks like so much as ensuring that people can connect an icon on a button
to the feature that the button invokes. That's just engineering; balloon
help is what I use. Icons are really shortcuts for people who already
know the menus and have worked the application hard enough to know in
detail what it does. I think it's a shortcut to madness to expect every
icon to be completely self-explanatory to people who have never touched
the application before. That's why we have both menus and icons; menus
are really a built-in training course on using the app.

The more serious issue involves copyright and "needless differentiation."
Icons, like any graphical art, are copyrightable, and you can't just scrape
icons out of somebody else's app and pour them into your own. In fact,
you can't necessarily draw an icon yourself in the pattern of someone
else's icon; if it's too close (and how far can you go in a 32 X 32 grid?)
you get sued. If it's too different, you're inventing yet another dialect
in what should be a universal iconic language.

I hunted for and found the infamous EldoS Icons, a 100+ MB collection
of 20,000 scraped icons, and boggled at the number of different ways people
have devised to say the very same things. The reason that EldoS took it
down is same the reason there are so many: To avoid copyright infringement,
every major software vendor had to invent a completely independent icon
language for its own apps. (The shareware
thumbnail viewer that EldoS included with the now-disavowed icon collection
is still available and I found it quite useful.)

The open source world is way ahead of us in this respect. There are a number
of open source icon projects on SourceForge, though most of them are in
.png format and must be converted invidually to .ico files for Windows work.
The SVG icons are
probably the best known, though the ones I saw were 16 X 16 rather than
32 X 32. The SVG collection was fielded as a "reference iconset"
by its creators, and that's a really good concept. Perhaps over time Linux
distros will converge on the UI side, with a set of common icons spanning
all distros. We can hope, and in the meantime, I'll be mining SVG for internal
icons for Aardmail.

January 22, 2004:

The
landlord finally had the glass replaced in my office window here (see my
entry for January 2, 2004) and I did a little more detailed cleaning behind
the black couch. I was struck by the tendency of the glass shards to be
dagger-shaped rather than irregular in outline. (Even more regrettable are
the multitudes of quarter-inch fragments that are nearly invisible but have
precisely the same shape!) Auto glass manages to fall into tiny little cubettes
when shattered, though I don't know how that's accomplished. Some of the
people who beta tested my novel objected to my contention in the first chapter
that the diamond-coated corpses in the necropolis, when struck, would shatter
into narrow, arm-length, fearsomely sharp fragments on which a man could
impale himself. It seems to me that window glass always does fall into nasty
shapes when broken, so why not diamond? What dictates the shape of the fragments
when glass is broken? Given that we don'tyethave sheets of diamond
to experimentally shatter, should I have known better? And if so, how?

January 21, 2004:

As
some of you know, I recently co-authored a book with the tireless Joli
Ballew. Degunking
Windows rolled off press on Monday, from Paraglyph Press, the
imprint that I co-founded with Keith Weiskamp last year, and which is
my current employer. It's the first new book that Paraglyph has released
under our new sales/distribution relationship with O'Reilly. It's about
cleaning out your PC and covers everything from temp files to adware to
spam to registry keys. The point is to make older PCs run a little faster
and a little better, so people won't be tempted to just put them out on
the curb. Our slogan for the project is: "Don't junk itDegunk
it!"

The cover at left is an early one, before Joli took on the project, and
her name isn't shown. (I'll swap in a current cover shot as soon as I
get one.) The concept was actually Keith's, and I hope the campy cover
works. I keep wondering if the stock photo is truly period, or if they
dressed up some poor model born in 1982 in Fifties clothes, hair, and
makeup for the shoot. Talk about becoming your mother...or your grandmother.

Keep in mind that it's not a geek tome; we were shooting for an audience
of ordinary people who may not even know that degunking a computer is possible.
If you're a geek and don't know this stuff already, well, turn in your geek
badge!

January 20, 2004:

A few odd lots on this snowy Colorado morning:

My brother-in-law Bill Roper wasted no time in pointing out (in reference
to Habeus; see yesterday's entry) that if you can't find 'em, you can't
sue 'emand thus the chickenboners and Sobiggers (those who spam
through open proxies planted by the SoBig virus) have seized upon Habeus'
haiku as the key to getting past a lot of server-side spam filtering.
In fact, some people who don't get any email newsletters have seized
upon the haiku as a spam-filtering term. Alas...but they still get major
points for cleverness.

Pertinent to that, I was wondering if it's possible to probe for SoBig
proxies, or if the only people who know how to find them are the people
who planted them. As I read the technology, an open proxy like that
is as close to a one-way trap door as anything you could concoct under
TCP/IP, and if access to SoBig proxies became easy, we might even see
file trading networks that depend upon them for anonymous uploads.

It may not become a meme, but the term (which I first saw in 2002)
has finally risen above the level of an easy joke: Warsitting,
for the process of turning on your laptop from your desk and seeing
how many wireless networks you can find, without driving, flying, walking,
skiing, sledding or in fact even moving. When Carol and I moved into
this little rental house last April, we could pick up the network at
the elementary school up the hill. Now, Netstumbler can see no fewer
than four networks from here, and picks up a fifth if I plug a 6 dBi
omni into my Orinoco. I took my laptop up to the new house and from
the kitchen picked up five networks without an external antenna. In
a lot of middle-class neighborhoods, we seem to be approaching Wi-Fi
saturation, whew. Sooner or later something will appear based on this
phenom, and I wonder a lot what it will be.

Howard Dean got clobbered in the Iowa caucuses last night, and while
he may still snag the nomination, the lefty crowd should take it as
a warning: You can't win the presidency on a platform that consists
solely of hating the current president. There are a substantial number
of people in the middle of the political spectrum who think of politics
as neither tribal warfare nor beer-and-pretzels entertainment, but rather
an obnoxious (if necessary) component of the serious business of democratic
governance.

The Wall Street Journal ran a short piece this morning about
how the Big Three automakers are trying to stop several new hospitals
from expanding in the Detroit burbs. Why? If excess health care capacity
is available in affluent areas, it will be used, and around Detroit,
the automakers are paying for virtually all of it. Ford states publicly
that $1200 of the cost of each of its new cars is health benefits for
its employees. The health care providers state just as publicly that
suburban hospitals subsidize inner city health care for the uninsured,
and the automakers rightly see this as an unlegislated tax on them.
I'm wondering more and more over time if we shouldn't divorce health
care completely from employment. The more expensive health care gets,
the more all that money distorts the job market. Something's gotta give.

January 19, 2004:

There's a common abbreviation in use in ham
radio: "FB," meaning "fine business," which is another
way of saying, "good!" or "kewl!" I've used it for
thirty years, and only recently learned that among the younger, non-ham
crowd, it has a related but somewhat more emphatic meaning: "F-ing
brilliant!" Well, on Slashdot this morning, I learned of something
that I would definitely characterize as FB, whichever way you want to
take it.

A company named Habeas
has cut a deal with all the major server-side spam-filtering companies
to whitelist a short poem (a haiku, actually) so that any email containing
this poem is automatically allowed through the filters. There's some subtlety
involving mail headers, but that's the gist of it. The service is really
targeted at legitimate newsletter publishers who are being blocked by
server-side spam filters (see my entry for January 14, 2004) and need
a way to get through. Habeas vets the newsletters for legitimacy (which
involves a very stiff set of requirements!) and then licenses them
the use of the poem.

The real value-add in Habeas' service is that they aggressively prosecute
copyright violation on the poem. Copyright laws, not having been diluted
by direct marketing firms, are much stronger than any antispam
laws ever passed. So if a spammer starts using the haiku to get past filters,
Habeus goes after them with lawyers blazing.

Like I said, FB. It's not the final answer, and it's only one small piece
of the problem, but it's nice to see technologists thinking a little outside
the box for a change. All we need now is authentication, or at least SPF.

January 18, 2004:

How's
Jeff's House Coming?

I've been quiet for a couple of days because
the carpet is going in up at the house, and there was an immense
amount of grit and dirt and trash of all species scattered around the
entire structure. They told us that they would clean up before the carpet
went down...but what they meant is that they would clean up the areas
where there would be carpet. The unfinished bedroom, the mechanical room
(that's what they now call the place with concrete floors where things
like furnaces hang out) and the entire main level were pigstys. In addition
to pounds (I'm not kidding!) of good old Colorado dirt, there were screws
and wire snippets and cigarette packs and soda bottles and Burger King
cups and broken floor tiles and scraps of cardboard and tape and nails
and tacks and instruction sheets and pieces of locksets and bookshelf
brackets and lord only knows what elseall of which would be tracked
over and ground into our new carpeting by the tramping tradesmen, including
the guys who were laying the carpet.

So I've been up there for a couple of days, sweeping and vacuuming and
wet-mopping the whole place and the porch and the new front sidewalk to
boot. I'm not quite done yet, but it's a vast improvement over what I
was looking at Friday morning. It looks amazingly like a house now. There's
no "construction" left to do at all. What remains is cleanup
and touchup, leading to the inevitable game of "punch list"
that we'll begin sometime this coming week.

In the left margin are some recent photos, of the sidewalk and driveway
apron being poured, and the house itself as it now stands. There's lots
of construction debris lying around outside, and some of that will be picked
up (though not by me!) but in truth, the landscaping and detailed cleanup
of the lot around the house will have to wait until the ground thaws. Still,
we're almost there. It's been going on so long it'll seem funny actually
living therebut that's what Carol and I want right now more than anything
else on Earth.

January 15, 2004:

I suspect that there's a way to say "I
am overwhelmed!" in Elvish, but all my Tolkien books are packed,
so you'll just have to get it in the best words I know how to say.

Wow.

Having just gotten back from seeing The Return of the King for
the first time (with my new friend David Beers) I'm still bumping into
walls. And I realize that I missed a great chance. 36 years ago, in 1967,
three best friends who shared a lunch table at Lane Technical High School
in Chicago discovered Tolkien's trilogy at the same time, and for most
of the rest of our high school careers we talked about the story line,
argued about the pronunciation, and speculated who should play what characters
in the (what we considered inevitable) movie version. These same three
guys, myself, Tom Barounis, and George Hodous, pledged a solemn vow to
meet on the Moon to usher in the year 2000. Yes, we were seriousas
we spoke the words it was still 33 years away; how hard could that be?

We missed the Moon at Millennium (2000 or 2001, however you count it),
but I'm glad that I lived long enough to see the movie that we were sure
would be released by 1969. And what I should have done was found those
two guys, and gone somewhere to see it together, three seats in a row,
like we'd spent so many lunches back at Lane Tech. Tom now lives in Niles,
Illinois, less than a mile from where Carol grew up, and we see him regularly.
George vanished on us some time back, but I suspect he'll turn up again
when he's ready. And hey, there's always DVDs.

About the film itself I can't say very much. It rolled over me like a tidal
wave, just as the book did the first time I read it. Everybody has their
own quibbles (I have a few myself) but Peter Jackson did it as well as any
filmmaker ever could, and it's entirely possible that no fantasy film will
ever match it in sheer, glorious audacity. (No other fantasy film may ever
match it in revenues, either.) And as the last ship to leave Middle Earth
set sail from the Grey Havens, leaving three sad hobbits on the wharf, I
realized that what The Lord of the Rings was about, under it all,
was friendship, and how all good things in the world depend completely
on the bonds that we forge with one another, and how against those bonds
the gates of Hell cannot prevail. If you haven't seen it yet, go with your
friends. And if you saw it alone, go again. I guess I missed the Moonbut
one out of two ain't bad.

January 14, 2004:

Esther Schindler sent me a pointer to a
detailed article by Fred Langa describing an email experiment he conducted,
one that confirmed what many of us have long feared: That IP-based black
holes like MAPS and hair-trigger server-side spam filters are preventing
as much as 40% of legitimate email from reaching its destination.
We can't even search our "Junk Mail" folder for it, because
it never gets down as far as our own PCs. 40%.

Yikes!

Oddly, Fred favors Bayesian filters, which I found capricious and unpredictable
in my own tests, though in truth, POPFile would be much more effective
if it included a way to automatically build its whitelist from an address
book. I currently get between 500 and 600 spams per day, and I only stay
ahead of it by constantly fine-tuning Poco Mail's slightly lame and very
opaque filtering mechanisms. What gets past Poco requires a surgical precision
and rate of adaptation that we might not reasonably expect of an email
client. I'm building Aardmail not so much because I think it will be miraculously
effective so much as the fact that I will control it, and I'll be able
to counter newly discovered spammer attacks the same day I first see them.

In fact, I'm considering using a Pascal script interpreter component
in Aardmail, so that I can write filtering scripts in Pascal and add them
to Aardmail without having to recompile the whole program in Delphi each
time I have to tweak a filter.

What Fred Langa is really telling us is that, due to the spam onslaught,
email as a communications medium is failing. That being the case, it boggles
me that SPF and genuine address authentication simply aren't happening.
Authentication should, in fact, be the single most important challenge the
technology community facesand instead, we're bickering over DRM and
whether Microsoft has too much market share.

January 13, 2004:

Read yesterday's entry if you haven't alreadywe're
talking about the ebook almost-industry, and how the lack of industry
standards in virtually every facet of ebook publishing has stopped the
almost-industry in its almost-tracks. Yesterday I promised to explain
why strong ebook standards should worry Big Media.

However, I've changed my mind. What I was going to say is that strong
standards for ebook naming, hashing, and indexing (yielding an online
index of digital content something like Bowker's ISBN index of paper books)
would make file trading easier, because it would make file trading so
simple from the user's perspective as to be virtually automatic. In other
words, a file trader would look up an ebook in the index, and submit a
request for a particular title to the file trading system. At some point
(depending on how popular the requested item was) the item would come
back. (I'm being vague about mechanisms here because there are a lot of
ways to share files, and this concern applies to any and all of them.)

I thought that would be pretty scary, but it's actually not all that
different from what happens now. My problem is that I don't do any file
sharing myself, so the file sharing process still strikes me as irritatingly
difficult, much as the original 1983-vintage DOS-based Word Perfect struck
non-users as almost impossible to grasp, even while daily users made it
do backflips without half thinking. If you could simply yell at the sky,
"I want a copy of Assembly Language Step By Step!" and
it just falls into your hands, well, that scares me. Alas, the
people who make a hobby of file sharing are very good at it, and
particularly for popular titles (read here, titles fielded by Big Media)
getting them isn't a whole lot more difficult than yelling at the sky.

So we're already there, and as they never stop telling us, Big Media is
afraid of file sharing. However, what should scare Big Media even more is
what I've said several times already: File sharing is going underground,
into darknets and even personal, meatspace contact. You can hand a friend
a DVD-ROM containing 1,000 MP3s (or probably 1500 ebooks) in about five
seconds. And that's with today's clunky red-laser DVDs. Sooner than you
know, we'll be burning blue-laser DVDs with 27 GB capacity. You want high-bandwidth
file trading? Do the math.

January 12, 2004:

As both a publisher and a futurist I watch the
ebooks industryif you can call it thatreasonably closely.
It's not going especially well, as a major story in the Technology section
of today's Wall Street Journal clearly pointed out, if between
the lines. Industry leader Rosetta
Books, which four years ago created what even I consider a reasonable
business plan, has achieved annual revenues of only $100,000, and furloughed
all its full-time staff save CEO Arthur Klebanoff. If this is the industry
leader, wellwe may not have an industry.

Part of the problem is that today's reader hardware doesn't work well
except for illustration-free works like novels and textual references.
PDAs just don't have the display resolution, and Microsoft is still skimming
cream on the Tablet PC OS, forcing prices on what is basically a laptop
to $2500 or more. Oddly, I find that e-books read better for me on a CRT
than an LCD, at least at the current font-aliasing state of the art. If
there were still Radius Pivot CRT displaysa very clever pivoting
display that was popular seven or eight years ago, primarily for MacsI'd
be tempted to get one. I had a Genius monochrome portrait display for
many years and loved it, but the company foundered before it could field
effective Windows drivers.

Pricing has been a further issue. I don't think people are going to pay
full cover price or even 25% off cover price for a completely intangible
book. Rosetta has brought prices down to the $10 level, but even that's
too high. Consumers seem to think that $5 is about right, but nobody seems
to want to play at that price point. Publishers moan about piracy, and
authors moan about publishers. We still don't have an industry.

Chaos in the format and DRM world is another roadblock. There is huge
consumer resistance to the sort of scorched-earth DRM that big media is
demanding. Small media seems to have a better grip on this. I've found,
in auditing the alt.binaries.ebook.technical newsgroup on Usenet, that
O'Reilly's completely unprotected ebooks are the ones most frequently
posted. And is O'Reilly in trouble financially? Not at all. In fact, it's
probably the strongest small technical publisher out there. DRM may be
less necessary than we think.

It doesn't help that there are four or five completely incompatible DRM
systems in wide use (if "wide" means anything at all here) each
of which requires its own proprietary reader. Some of those readers take
liberties with Windows that I find unacceptable, like refusing to run
if a debugger is in memory, and refusing to be knocked out of memory with
Task Manager.

I actually have a few of O'Reilly's compiled HTML (.chm) ebooks, and
they work surprisingly well. Adobe's PDF format works well too, and doubtless
there are other formats that I would like if I could run them. This problem
of multiple formats could be mitigated by the use of an XML-based metadata
system like RDF that would allow
an ebook to export its TOC and index to a centralized library manager.
I would buy more technical ebooks if I could do cross-library searches
on them, and I'd be more than happy to work with multiple readers by clicking
on a line in a search-results list.

I guess what this means is that to have an ebooks industry, we first
need an industry-standard ebook API. It hasn't hit the ebook publishing
industry yet, because they're book people, not programmers. Nonetheless,
it's true: Ebooks are databases, not books. Few people are going
to read novels on their PDAs, but I would be happy to read technical books
here in my computer chair, if I could centralize access to library functions.
That would be a wonderful thing for consumers...

...but there is a very subtle danger in it for publishers, especially those
paranoid big ones. (They may not be paranoid completely without reason.)
I'll explain that danger tomorrow.

January 11, 2004:

I don't really think CAN SPAM is going to reduce
my spam count one lick, but I've been watching my daily intake of spam
closely since January 1 to see if the nature of incoming spam changes
at all. So far, not much: I've gotten somewhat fewer new domains to block,
and a few more messages are appearing with postal addresses in them somewhere.

This is good, at least for the moment. A postal address is a good filter
value, one unlikely to generate any false positives in legitimate email
that I might receive. Fewer new spammer addresses probably means that
those spammers who want to stay "legitimate" by registering
their own addresses (rather than forging headers or using chickenboners
or open relays) are kicking back and trying to figure out how to wiggle
out from under CAN SPAM's restrictions and still pump out spam in billion-piece
quantities. This won't last. My prediction is that the shadowy spammer
utilities that create spam will begin generating phony land addresses
with random elements to give the appearance of legitimacy without creating
a persistent filter value in each message. In other words, we'll begin
seeing addresses like these in messages from the same spammer:

2007 Church St. Suite 24
1206 Church St. Suite 407
442 Church St. Suite 51

etc. It's only a matter of time. In the meantime, I figured I would again
post links to my two big filtering files, for blocked
domains and blocked
subjects. These are the exact files used by Poco Mail. I keep meaning
to create a text merge utility so people can merge mine with their own;
hang in there; it's really an hour's work or less in Delphi. I just have
to bestir myself to do it. In the meantime, it's interestingand a
little funnyto look at all the permutations on the spelling of "Viagra"
that these guys come up with, perhaps not caring that each is a wonderful
filter value. These have helped a lot. Message body filtering is much more
difficult, because of the near-universal use of comment tags mixed into
the middles of wordsand more recently, the expression of the entire
textual message in individual HTML character specifiers like "&#105",
which encodes lowercase "i". Poco can't handle that, but Aardmail
will.

January 10, 2004:

How's
Jeff's House Coming?

Not much time to write this morning, so I'll
do a quick update on the house. We're truly closing in on it:

The upper decks are both done, and the lower deck needs only its railing,
which should go in on Monday or Tuesday. The view from the decks is
incredible, especially at night. I can't capture the city lights in
a photo, but the links at left may give you some idea.

My library wall is finished, rolling ladder and all. All we need are
the clips (which they forgot to order) to support the shelves.

They're putting in the front sidewalk on Monday. Interestingly, they
have to thaw the ground over which the sidewalk will be poured, and
they do this with a machine that pumps hot water through a hose that
is looped back and forth over the area in question.

All the exterior painting is done, and all the interior wall paint
needs is some touchup work. They still have to paint the concrete floor
in the garage and in my lower-level workshop.

Our cooktop is still backordered, but the rest of the kitchen is all
in place, with the only work left to be done is to connect the water
line to the icemaker in the fridge.

The carpeting still needs to be put down, but that's about the last
thing to be donethat, and an awesome amount of cleanup.

The remarkable thing is that the whole project may be as much as 2 weeks
behind schedule, which in the custom homes industry is so close to on time
it might as well be ahead of schedule by two months. This doesn't mean it
was easy, but compared to many horror stories we've heard from all quarters,
ours was a well-behaved project. We're hoping to close by Valentine's Day
or a little before, so that the Big Move can begin.

January 9, 2004:

Some Wi-Fi odd lots as I grind through the update
leading to Jeff Duntemann's Wi-Fi Guide 2E:

I bought a Wireless-G USB adapter, and couldn't get it to deliver
throughput past Wireless-B levels of about 4 Mbps. It drove me nutsthe
other nodes on the G-only network were delivering throughput as high
as 23 Mbps, which is astonishing. At last I found that the USB 2.0 port
on my Dell Xeon was really a USB 1.1 port. USB 1.1 is roughly as fast
as Wireless-B. I didn't think an adapter intended for use with USB 2.0
would work in a USB 1.1 port, but this one (the Linksys WUSB54G) will
happily work in a USB 1.1 port, pumping packets as fast as the port
will taken them, which is about 4-4.5 Mbps. There is nothing physical
on the back of the machine to tell me what sort of USB port it is, and
I haven't figured out yet how to check from software. Moral: RTFM, if
you can understand the FM, or believe what it says.

A box scanown at CompUSA shows that all the market leaders (Linksys,
D-Link, Belkin, and so on) are way slow to get Wi-Fi Wireless-G
certification for their products, while latecomers like Buffalo have
G certification on every box. This appears to be the price of designing
products for "draft-G" and then having to re-engineer them
to meet final 802.11g specs. None of the Linksys Wireless-G items
I bought is Wi-Fi Alliance certified for Wireless-G. One of my imminent
tests is to pick up a Buffalo Wireless-G PC card and see how well it
talks to non-certified Wireless-G gear.

After describing Linksys' new WMA11B
wireless media node in my January 3, 2004 entry, I recalled vaguely
that somebody somewhere had an open source project for comparable media
server software that could work wirelessly or otherwise, serving content
over a network. As I'm not sure what such a thing should be called,
I can't find it. I understand that the real value-added in the WMA11B
is hardware that converts digital data to composite or S-Video or audio
to feed to your consumer electronics, but a cheap PC with the right
boards in it can do that too. Although the WAM11B's hardware seems to
work well, reviewers
on Amazon were very hard on the bundled software. This isn't rocket
science. Somewhere should be instructions on how to lash something like
this up yourself. Any clues?

January 8, 2004:

A few odd lots as the snow melts off the rooftops:

Pete Albrecht sent me what he calls his best Saturn photo yet, and
I stand amazed. This is from a commercial 12" telescope (the Meade
LX200) set up
in his backyard in the thick of smoggy Orange County. To me it looks
like the sort of shot we used to ooh and ahh over from Lick Observatory
and Palomar. The secret seems to be taking many individual shots via
a CCD Web cam (the Phillips ToUCam in this case) and combining them
via a stacker program to average out the vagaries of a jittery atmosphere.
However it's accomplished, it's revolutionizing amateur astrophotography.
I have the CCD Web cam (and a scope adapter that Pete made for me) but
the scope will have to wait for better weather here.

In their desperation to avoid spam filters, spammers are resorting
to subject lines that consist solely of four or five completely unrelated
words: "debug anemone hologram beckon." No clue as to what
the message is about (and you'd think a dead giveaway for spam) but
they're still going out, which must mean people still open them, read
them, and respond to them.

Odder still are the very latest, in which spammer utilities insert
unrelated words into the middle of the "real" words of the
subject line: "Its much beaugusttter when its lotailwindnger."
We're dipping toward Lewis Carroll here. I laugh out loud, and continue
to build Aardmail, against which such things simply won't work.

I'm sure most of you already know this, but it is essential that you
turn off "install on demand" if you use Internet Explorer.
An idiotic feature if ever there were one, this little gem allows "drive-by
installs" of hijackware like CoolSearch. Go to a Web site, and
boom! It's on your system and very difficult to get rid of. Go to Tools|Internet
Options|Tab:Advanced| and under Browsing (about seven items down) un-check
Enable Install On Demand. Better still, use Mozilla or Opera.

The official measurement of last Friday's horrendous wind gusts (see
my entry for January 2, 2004) has been announced as 110 Mph. As they
used to say in the Sixties: What a rush!

January 7, 2004:

There was a riff on Plastic recently about the
sad state of futurism, and for a change I generally agree with them:
Futurism has fallen on bad times. The primary reason is that current futurists
have a technology fetish, held over from the heady years mid-century when
technology really was the prime mover among the many forces of
history. Futurists have this bad habit of looking at increases in horsepower
or computer power and extrapolating those curves in isolation. (A lot
of us nerds fondly remember George O. Smith's goofy SF extrapolation of
Fifties technology to gigantic vacuum tubes serving outer space radio
relay stations.) Certain technologies may someday become what I call "hinge
forces" (nanotechnology is tops on that short list) but at the moment
we're in a sort of technological interregnum: Tweaking stuff that was
invented thirty or more years ago. The last fundamental technological
mechanism to be broadly deployed on Earth was the computer network. I
wonder a lot what the next one will be, but the real work of a futurist
these days lies elsewhere.

If you want to anticipate the future in some useful way, you have to
look at things like culture, demographics, andegad!religion.
Harold Bloom's confused but still engaging 1992 book The American Religion
understands that much, at least, though Bloom's record on specifics is
not good. Early in the book, he laments that there may never be another
President elected from the Democratic party...just months before Bill
Clinton's admittedly slim victory. In his view, culture defines the future,
which I think is dead-on. (The last 75 years of technotopia may have been
an anomaly in human history. We may not know for another thousand years
how to look at the 20th Century. Maybe the Singularity is already over,
and we missed it.) Bloom's most outrageous prediction is that the era
of religious warfare has returned, and that the future (he figures by
the year 2100) will be a clash between Mormon culture in the West, and
Islamic culture in the East.

Huh? Mormon culture? He was ridiculed for this statement ten years ago,
but I give him credit for looking at some real trends, and some undeniable,
if often buried-under-a-box demographics:

The Mormon birth rate is the highest of any culturally identifiable
cohort in the West.

The growth of the Mormon religion worldwide rivals that of any other
religion.

The Arabic birthrate is the highest of any in the Middle East, certainly
higher than that of Israel.

American culture is moving in a profoundly conservative directionvery
much toward the cultural place where the Mormons already live.

The Mormon religion and Islam have some striking cultural parallels,
especially in their view of the nature of the family and religious authority
on Earth.

The LDS faith began as a patriarchal, polygamous culture that welds secular
and religious authority into one system. Ditto Islam. The young Mormon
Church was forced to abandon some things (like polygamy) by secular American
authority, but that could change. Bloom feels that as Mormons out-breed
other demographic cohorts in America, polygamy will eventually return,
and if America survives at all, it will become a Mormon democracyone
that will eventually transform the West and vie in a nuclear contest with
an Islamic East.

Whew. Now that's futurism to conjure with!

My point is mostly that we have to get beyond our obession with technological
change to get any valid sense for the future. I sense that we futurists
got in this bad place for a reason: Technology is far more values-neutral
than culture (which is almost entirely about values) so we as a culture
can speculate about technology much more freely than about culture, which
would basically be passing judgment on our own cherished innards. Most of
the big cultural questions these days (Why are the poor poor? Does race
mean anything at all? Are any values absolute, or are all of them relative?
Does genetics dictate destiny? Does religion have positive value?) are politically
incorrect and off the tableso we bitch about not having flying cars.
Until we can get over that squeamishnessand stop screaming epithets
at those who make the attemptfuturism itself has no future.

January 6, 2004:

How's
Jeff's House Coming?

As you can probably tell from my recent posts,
I'm hard at the Wi-Fi business again, while updating my Wi-Fi book to
its second edition.

I had this notion not long ago, while thinking about what the amateur
radio adaptation of Wi-Fi called HSMM (High Speed Multi-Media) radio will
be good for. Hams hope to create a mesh network bouncing between rooftops,
giving hams a sort of alternate Internet that they control.

I'm not sure this is possible anymore, for a couple of reasons: Hams
are getting fewer and farther between compared to their glory days in
the 1950s and 60s. The "father between" is critical here, because
mesh network nodes have to be fairly close or else use high-gain antennas.
Because hams are sparse, nodes will not be close, and because of the ubiquity
of scorched-earth deed restrictions, visible antennas of any kind are
mostly illegal these days. (There's an interesting exception that hams
may exploit: make your HSMM antenna a worked-over small-format satellite
dish, which are exempted from deed restrictions by FCC ruling. Most interestingly,
FCC regs exempt the antenna, and not the serviceso if it's
less than a meter in diameter, it doesn't matter what it's used for.)
I have high hopes for HSMM and will try it, but my guess is that there
aren't enough hams around to make it really hit critical mass. The most
important tool required for the creation of HSMM will be a detailed index
of where hams are who wish to try it. Hopefully, the ARRL will create
such an index.

Now, let's talk about another possibility: Mesh networks assembled by
hobbyists using open-source software running on PCs, and depending on
the increasingly common problem of overlapping networks. As more and more
people in urban and suburban areas implement Wi-Fi, more and more networks
touch one another at their edges without any need for gain antennas. Now
imagine a background utility that monitors the presence of adjacent networks,
and manages simple file transfer and message passing across adjacent network
boundaries. We could create an alternate Internet in this way, and it
would be interesting to see what could be done with it.

In fact, I'm far from sure that such a network couldn't be created automatically,
by a virus or trojan. Get inside the network, sniff for WEP or WPA passwords,
and pass them along to your virus buddy on the next network over...egad,
what a notion. I'm not sure it's possible, but I'm far less sure that it's
not. And with 60% of wireless networks still unprotected by any security
at all, propagation of such a system could be rapidand create a sort
of "spam superhighway" or file-sharing darknet unsuspected by
the very people whose machines are doing all the traffic passing. Oh brave
new world, that has the potential for such subversion in it!

January 5, 2004:

We have an interesting and little-understood
problem in the wireless networking industry: too much power (and
hence range) from consumer-class Wi-Fi access points and wireless gateways.
Most APs have fixed RF power outputs in the 30-40 mw range. With decent
antennas, power like that makes a network reachable from 200 feet away
or more. Quick: How many of you have houses that are 200 feet in any dimension?

This wasn't a problem when Wi-Fi first hit the streets, because so few
homes had networks. But with APs going for $60 online and relentless price
pressure at retail, we're seeing more and more cases where two, three,
or even four networks overlap on middle class and (especially) upper middle
class blocks. For the most part, 802.11-family technologies are extraordinarily
resistant to interference. But the more we push the bandwidth envelope
with technologies like Super G from Atheros (a Wi-Fi chipset manufacturer)
the more adjacent networks are going to begin getting in one another's
way. Super G "bonds" two Wi-Fi channels (5 and 6) to create
a sort of superchannel smack in the middle of the band, and in doing so
takes virtually the entire band, except (maybe) channel 11. Here's a
detailed report on Super G that is considerably more charitable than
most others I've read.

What we really need in consumer APs is the sort of "dial down"
power control that Cisco offers in its high-end Aironet 350 gear: Choose
from 100, 50, 30, 20, 5, or 1 milliwatt power levels as your installation
requires. 5 milliwatts is probably all that you need in a Chicago bungalow,
and 1 mw will serve you well in a two bedroom condo. Still, unless you
shell out $400+ for an Aironet 350, your choice is...30 mw.

Most people don't understand that if someone can intercept your home
network from a private place (like inside their house down the street
from yours) they can crack your encryption system at their leisure, even
if it takes six or eight weeks, and you'll never know it. New key rotation
systems like that present in WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) will make this
very difficult, but WPA is very new and not enabled by default. Even after
three years of yelling about it, only about 40% of Wi-Fi users turn on
encryption at all.

It's funny, in a way: Consumers are so used to thinking that "more
is better" that vendors will not add a few cents to their UMC to give
consumers the ability to choose less power. And yet in coming years,
the ability to adjust wireless network power levels may be our #1 way to
keep the band from descending into screaming chaos of overlapping networks
shouting one another down, with nobody moving data faster than 1 or 2 Mbps.
It's ugly and going to get uglier. Stay tuned.

January 4, 2004:

Back in my April 23, 2003 entry I proposed a
spam filter called Aardmail, which was originally to be implemented as
a POP proxy, meaning it would insert itself as a background process between
your email client and your email server.

I'm less sure now that this is a good idea. I want my mail to come down
quickly when I call it, and all the work that a POP proxy does is done
while mail is being downloaded. Aardmail is going to do some fairly original
and possibly compute-intensive things, so I'd prefer that it always execute
in the background, polling my mail server once per minute or so to get
mail. Besides, I had some weirdnesses while using POPFile, and I currently
have NAV working as a POP proxy, looking for email viruses. Daisy chaining
POP proxies sounds slow and dicey.

I'm going to try implementing Aardmail as an email robot, basically a
one-way email client that only downloads mail and doesn't send it. It
leaves anything that isn't spam on the server, and stores deleted spam
in a rolling archive that rolls off the end of the earth in 30 days. (This
is insurance against false positives.) This will be a good education in
writing threads in Delphi, as well as a good brushup on POP3 and a great
many other things I haven't touched in a few yearsor maybe more
than a few.

Why Aardmail? I've basically reached the limits of what Poco's spam filtering
can do, and I need some additional precision. I get lots of email with
subject lines and bodies containing text like this:

E"N`L.A~R'G:E..Y^O`U-R..P"E,N*I.S..N^O`W

Some spammer utility somewhere sprinkles random punctuation between each
character, and the mix is never the same twice. Poco is helpless against
this, but it's a three-liner in Delphi. There are other checks that are
either difficult or impossible with Poco's filters (I will only spend
some much time figuring out which) that are straightforward text processing
using any programming language. What I need is a platform that can bring
headers (and if the headers pass muster, then bodies) down from my POP3
server and allow me to apply fairly simple filters. The real work in creating
Aardmail is the platform, not the filters themselves.

The other thing that I want Aardmail to do is give me statistics. I want
to know how long spammers use their domains, and how much mail concerns
penis pills versus mortages vs prescription drugs. (Oddly, porn is a much
smaller part of the mix now. Much more money in gray-market Vicodin, apparently.)
I don't know if that's interesting, but statistics can be that way: You
can't tell ahead of time whether they'll tell you anything, but sometimes
you stare at a graph, and suddenly you slap the side of your head and
say, Aha! I've got the bastards now! And since it will be database-driven
anyway (I'm a database guy from way back) storing and reporting
statastics is easy for me.

I've had a few false starts, but I've got another prototype underway, this
time using as many of the (now free) TurboPower components as I can. I'll
let you know how the project progresses.

January 3, 2004:

A few odd lots whilst I break for lunch on a
very busy day:

Reader Jason Kaczor sent me this
pointer to a site that explains how to speed up Adobe's Acrobat
Reader by disabling the loading of a lot of unnecessary DLLs when it
starts up. I don't know what they all do, but I found that after doing
the mod, Reader still works and it comes up way faster.

Now that Yahoo Groups has decided that it's going to sell all our
addresses to the spammers anyway, I'm looking for a new listserv hosting
site, ideally one that doesn't charge. Any recommendations?

Some Howard Dean fans have tried to convince me that Dean is eminently
electable (see my January 1, 2004 entry) but I'm unconvinced, and an
article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal lays out in detail
Dean's promises to raise taxes earlyand massivelyin his
administration.(That particular article isn't online, but this
one covers similar ground.) He gets points for honesty and certainly
for balls, but promising to raise the middle class's taxes is never
a good way to get elected. What puzzles me more is why conservatives
like the Club for Growth are trying so hard to
defeat his bid for the Democratic nomination. Sheesh, they should
be funding it! The only guy easier to beat would be Al Sharpton.

Linksys has released an interesting gadget that allows you to stream
content to your home entertainment center (TV/stereo) using Wireless-B.
The WMA11B
comes with a remote control and software to allow you to flip through
digital pictures on your TV (this would be very useful for me these
days) and play MP3s or movies through your TV/stereo. At about $150,
it's reasonably cheap, and would allow me to stash all my digital content
on one dedicated machine and just distribute it throughout the house
by Wi-Fi. (Of course, I have CAT5 running throughout the new house,
but the WMA11B will work with a wired network too.)

January 2, 2004:

This
was a New Year's Day to remember. The day itself passed unremarkably;
Carol and I took it easy, and right after supper went to the Cheyenne
Mountain Zoo for their Zoo Lites festival. Carol went to bed early, and
I sat on the black couch in my office, reading Jay Ingram's PopSci book,
The Barmaid's Brain. There was a windstorm brewing, but I ignored
the gusts that made the gutters howl, and I finally packed it in about
11:00 PM.

That was just about when it got crazy. From 11:00 until about 5:00AM,
we listened to the winds go absolutely berserk. The house creaked and
shook, and we could hear unknown small objects rattle against the west
windows. We felt the bed bump around, and Carol finally went downstairs
to sleep on the couch about 2:00. Since we only have one sleep-able couch,
I stayed upstairs, gamely trying to ignore the incredible racket and fall
asleep. I almost got there, remarkably enough.

Then,
about 2:30AM, just when we thought it couldn't get any worse, it did.
A sound like a rumbling train rose amidst the general rattle, shake, and
howl. Weird noises underlay the roaring wind, and it wasn't until morning
that I realized that the noises were of our back fence disintegrating,
along with fences throughout the neighborhood. A slat blown free of the
fence hit the west window of my home office here, blasting needles of
glass the entire length of the 15-foot room. The small couch where I had
been reading earlier in the evening was immediately in front of the broken
window, and The Barmaid's Brain was covered in daggers of broken
glass. (The photo shows only some of the glassI didn't think to
snap the shot until I had already gotten the big pieces into a bag and
vacuumed the floor.)

That
was quite enough. We retired to the basement, unboxed our sleeping bags,
and spent the remainder of the night trying to sleep while fearing that
the wind would shear the house off at the foundation. We caught only a
couple hours, and I'm moving around in a fog.

It wasn't a tornado. The wind that hit the neighborhood was a hot
wind, and that was a clue. It was 44 degrees out when we went to bed,
but by 2:30, it had risen to 54. We had been hit by a violent chinook,
a strange wind pattern that results when rapid winds move down in elevation
very quickly. As the strong westerly wind moved over the east rim of the
Front Range, it descended thousands of feet in a matter of secondsin
our case, 4,000 feet, down the near-vertical face of Cheyenne Mountain.
The faster and farther it falls, the warmer it gets.

We actually did better that some others in the area. Chris next door
lost two windows and his fence to boot, and up Broadmoor Bluffs a few
blocks, a new house that had just been framed was leveled. We went past
it this morning on the way to check on our own new house (we're renting
here) and saw that the just-framed house was now a pile of twisted 2 X
4s and roof trusses. (Our new house was undamaged save for two disturbed
roof tiles. Whew.) Fences everywhere are down, and there's a lot of sweeping
up to do. I need to get back to cleaning up the glass in the office here,
and hope that the management company can get my window boarded up before
it starts snowing tonight.

What a mess.

January 1, 2004:

Happy New Year, gang! The weather's improved,
I wasn't nuts enough to lose half a night's sleep staying up until midnight,
and the trail's clear up ahead, as Filer Fitzgerald is fond of sayingand
if I can manage to get my novel published this year, you'll find out who
Filer Fitzgerald is.

Every January 1 since I started Contra I've been temped to publish a
list of predictions, and each year I've resisted. So I'll be a contrarian
in the face of my own habits (which itself is a good habit to get into)
and hand you ten predictions for 2004, in no particular order:

Jeff and Carol will move into their new house sometime during the
month of February. (I had to make sure I'd get at least one right!)

The SCO lawsuit will collapse, and though no legal points on the GPL
are likely to be decided, I think no other company will ever be so bold
again as to try something this legally insane.

As we continue to hand power in Iraq back to the Iraqis, the place
will quiet down and Bush will claim victory. Troops will remain, though
casualties will plummet.

Darknets will become the issue in the online arena, as file
trading basically vanishes into heavily encrypted and authenticated
private networks.

Wireless-G will basically sweep Wireless-B and Wireless-A into the
dustbin of history. Whether or not consumers truly understand what "megabits
per second" are, they've been well-trained for decades that more
is better.

Paid public hotspots will go into decline, and free public hotspots
as promotional value-added for restaurants and bookstores will rise
sharply. See Panera
Bread as an early major example.